2.8 Operating system monitoring tools

In addition to the memory management settings available in a running Lisp program, you can use tools provided by UNIX for monitoring swap space. Some of these tools and their use are shown in Table 2.1.

Operating system monitoring tools

Function

Platform

UNIX Command

swap space required by an application

all

size

detailed information on the host machine's swap area

SGI

swap -l

all others

pstat -a

information on a running process

SGI

ps -l

all others

ps -u orps -v

For complete descriptions of these commands, use the UNIX functionman with the command as an argument.

The amount of swap space required by multiple invocations of the same Lisp image is not simply the sum of the swap spaces required by the individual Lisp processes. Multiple Lisp processes share one copy of the text segment in memory and thus use a reduced amount of swap space.